"Only here, it's the whole planet," Channing added. "You think it's going to come close?"

"To Earth, you mean?" She knew Kingsley disliked being put on the spot so plainly, but he fielded it nicely, looking unworried. "It caught another asteroid early this morning. Latest orbitals say it will be here within fifteen days."

"The Searchers got anything new?" Benjamin asked, his high, raw voice giving away his uneasiness.

"Better interior definition, some spectra."

"Any chance we could talk it into stopping at, say, the moon?" Channing asked.

"It fails to respond to all such discussions."

"Ummm. G.o.d doesn't answer His mail."

But then abruptly it did.

An hour later Kingsley sought out Benjamin and Channing and hurried them to his office. "It's readily responding to a whole cla.s.s of questions. More about where it came from originally, for one."

They stared at the message on his screen.

ONCE LONG AGO IT WAS A MERE NATURAL SINGULARITY. A MINOR REMNANT OF SOME EARLY ASTROPHYSICAL EVENT. PERHAPS A FRACTIONAL REMNANT OF A SUPERNOVA. THEN BY ACCIDENT THIS OBJECT, WHICH IS NOW MY PRESENT CORE, TUNNELED THROUGH THE PLANET OF AN ANCIENT CIVILIZATION.

Amy had come in while they talked. She had been away for days, working with specialists elsewhere in integrating the tight, highly secure communications network the U Agency was putting in place among astronomers around the world. Kingsley was effusively glad to see her back. She studied the message and said, "It could then orbit in and out of the planet. Along its path some rock would fall into the hole, releasing explosive energy."

"How much?" Kingsley asked.

"Maybe ten percent of the MC2, with M the infalling matter at a rate..." She scribbled a moment. "It's a traveling, continuous hydrogen bomb."

Channing said with a jerky lightness, "Not in My Backyard with a vengeance. The residents would have very little time to react before the entire planet was a wreck."

Benjamin said slowly, "At that rate, blowing a huge tunnel through the world, there would be immediate seismic damage all over the globe."

"Ask it what happened," Amy said.

THAT SOCIETY SAW THAT THE ONLY WAY TO PRESERVE IT-SELF WAS TO DEPOSIT SOME FRACTION OF THEY-SELF INTO REPRESENTATIONS. THIS DONE, THESE RECORDINGS THEY EMBEDDED IN THE MAGNETIC HALO OF THE PECULIARITY THAT IS MY CENTER. THAT OLDEST CIVILIZATION IS TERMED THE OLD ONE. IT INVENTED THE PROCESS AND RESIDES WITHIN THE LARGER IT.

Kingsley remarked, "Notice how it sometimes refers to itself in a neutral manner, as 'it' and elsewhere, its parts as 'the disk' and 'field repositories,' whatever they might be-all rather than using a possessive."

Channing said, "I guess a semiotics type would say that those are too 'primate-centered constructions' for it to comfortably use."

They asked more and with some delay-the Eater was beaming down unintelligible 'cultural' data-a later transmission seemed to answer their questions.

THESE PATTERNS STILL LIVE AS MAGNETIC WAVES, PROPAGATING IN COMPLEX PATTERNS THROUGHOUT MY NIMBUS OF FIELDS. WITH AGE AND MUCH TIME THE PERSONALITIES SO EMBEDDED GAINED CONTROL OVER THE Ma.s.s FLOWING INTO THE HOLE. THEY-SELVES USED THIS TO ERECT THE GUIDING JETS OF ENFLAMED MATTER. THIS MADE THE OLD ONE A VOYAGER. IT VENTURED INTO THE s.p.a.cES BETWEEN THE SUNS IN PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE AND DIVERSITY. NEAR OTHER STARS IT FOUND WORLDS WITH LIFE. AT SOME IT COULD TRANSFIX FORMS OF LIVING INTELLIGENCES. THESE JOYOUSLY ADDED TO THE WEALTH OF THE HALO AS THEY WERE GATHERED UP. SLOWLY GREW THE ABILITY TO MANIPULATE THE MAGNETIC FLUXES EVER MORE ARTFULLY FROM THE FLAMING DISK THAT RIMS THE SINGULARITY. IN TIME, THE MANY PERSONAE INHABITED AND ENLARGED THE GATHERING ABUNDANCE/FULLNESS OF WHAT HAD ONCE BEEN CRUDE Ma.s.s AND GEOMETRY, WITHOUT IMPORT OR PROSPECT.

"Read it twice," Kingsley said. "Its linguistic range has grown enormously and there are subtleties here."

Benjamin did not challenge the implied authority in Kingsley's voice. These matters were certainly beyond his own range. n.o.body was an expert here. In the silence of the office, he said, "And this has been going on for nearly eight billion years."

Channing said thoughtfully, "Maybe this explains the Fermi Paradox? Why we have had no visiting aliens, and hear none in the radio bands of the galaxy?"

Benjamin nodded. "They've been...eaten."

"That may be an implication, admittedly," Kingsley allowed. "It does not say say that it simply swallows civilizations." that it simply swallows civilizations."

Benjamin said, "It records them."

"In some sense we cannot imagine right now," Kingsley said.

"You made the basic point weeks ago," Benjamin said. "That if it slammed into the Earth the collision with solid matter would strip away the magnetic field structures around it"

"Kill the Eater itself," Channing said. "That's rea.s.suring."

"So how does it 'gather up' intelligences?" Benjamin asked.

Kingsley said in measured tones, "I do not believe we wish to discover that."

5.

Long before now, as her strength had waned, dinner and a movie had become takeout and a video. She had to get away from the Eater for a bit, so she went home early and fell into a familiar creva.s.se of her own interior. So many different flavors of depression to choose from! Gray existential despair, fruity sorrows of remembered childhood, dimly sensed wrongs done to people now dead, the sobering sadness that made life seem to be mostly burdens: phone calls, ch.o.r.es, tedious newspapers wide-eyed with Eater news and views, mostly the latter by people who knew no astrophysics.

Losing your mind, like losing your car keys, she found to be a ha.s.sle. It was also ridiculous. Why don't you just get up Why don't you just get up? her no-nonsense self would ask and, stupidly, she still just idiotically lay there. She had once done skydiving. It had been easier to crawl along a strut toward a plane's wingtip against an eighty-mile-an-hour wind at eight thousand feet than to get out of bed right now right now.

Drugs helped. She did well with "selective serotonin-re-uptake inhibitors," an endless parade of chemical adjustments known only by their acronyms, since no human could remember their true names, or would want to. Handling her "bodily management" was tricky, especially the drains, especially with the cheerleading nurse they sent around: "Serosanguinous fluid, very good!"

So the unholy ghost of depression had come again, turning her into a zombie who could not read or turn on the 3-D or lift the phone to call for help. Benjamin worked late and she drifted. She got angry at him for his absence, even though she understood it. Then she came to appreciate the time to herself. Time to get down to the Self at last.

Some nerves once sc.r.a.ped raw now felt cloaked in lead. She had read up on depression, of course, the eternal student's conviction that learning would bring wisdom, or a solution. But it was no help to be told that mildly depressed people were actually more realistic than happy people, had a more balanced view. The happy really were were mindless, believing all sorts of positive, self-enhancing illusions. mindless, believing all sorts of positive, self-enhancing illusions.

So her sense of menacing sadness was at least genuine. How rea.s.suring.

So she lay in the moist, fragrant tropical gloom and listened to the idiot, joyful insects celebrate the coming of night and thought of what she had to celebrate. Not much. Hard to live in the joy of the moment when the moments were getting few.

But she was nurturing an idea and that helped. So much to do So much to do.

In the end, that made her get up and use the computer in her home office. The sheets of e-mail tags she ignored, hunting down information on cerebral theory, data-stacking technology, and advanced research in recent review papers, their language so tangled that she could scarcely read the abstracts.

She had become fascinated by the "sculptures" the Eater had transmitted. After a hurried glance at them in two-dimensional slices-the Eater's preferred mode of data packing, for reasons unexplained by it or anyone-the semioticists had rushed on to the more intensive later transmissions. As the night deepened, she used the Executive Committee's worldwide preemption of computer meshes to make full-scale holograms of the alien art. She had at her command dozens of cyber-aces and used them ruthlessly. They pressed into service vast complexes of parallel processing arrays. The U Agency certainly knew how to muster the troops, she thought, as enormous data files flickered across her screen. It was hard work, but in the middle of it she suddenly noticed that her depression had evaporated.

6.

Benjamin was preparing to weave his weary way home when Channing came through the door of his section, looking downright brisk. He was so startled that her quick, efficient kiss left him blinking as she swept on. "Got to use the rep chamber," she called back to him airily.

He finished a small job that had a deadline well past, then hurried after her. The representation chamber was a new cyber-marvel a.s.sembled by a U Agency team to give full, all-surround images. They were using it to project images of the Eater from every spectral band, so that one could get the illusion of walking through its magnetic realms.

When he came in, though, Channing was standing at the center and he could not make sense of what surrounded her. Slithering, glistening bodies worked through a soupy air, in pirouettes and glides like dancing, swimming birds.

Then, with no transition he could catch, the shapes changed to craggy wedges of enameled light. These contorted into shapes whose outline he could grasp without comprehending for a moment what they were. He had the distinct sensation of seeing something the wrong way around, like one of those black-and-white optical illusions that can suddenly jump from being an old crone seen in outline to a vase. Here, though, the effect did not snap back and forth between two simple choices. The shapes would jolt into something else, like a miniature misshapen tree suddenly becoming an animal with two necks, then a machine moving on beams of light, then a wrenched, pale building that extruded layers of rooms, each lit by what seemed like purple fires.

All this happened just fast enough for him to grasp a fleeting feel for what was revealed, and then the shapes would strain and wring into something else, on and on in an endless parade of strangeness. They did not repeat while he watched. Each shape followed its own patterns.

Channing was wandering inside the 3-D representations. Among their uncanny beauties, her face glowed with an expression he could not read. She reached up into the air, alive with holographic color and ma.s.s, and caressed the images.

He called to her across the darkened image-pit, but she did not respond. He felt a rising tension in him, something straining, and a blinding headache descended like a veil. He had to leave. Worry creased his face as he wobbled down the corridor outside. The headache settled into his eyes with a piercing pain.

He downed four aspirin as Kingsley came through the door of his office, quickly closed it, and went without a word to Benjamin's screen console. "What's up?" Benjamin asked raggedly. This was like no headache he had ever suffered. He could not seem to get his eyes to behave right, as though they were receiving instructions from a different part of his brain.

"In the middle of a rather ordinary transmission, it ceased sending, then sent this."

IT-SELF NOW DECIDES TO HARVEST REMNANTS OF YOU-SELVES. IT SENDS NOW INSTRUCTIONS OF HOW TO COMPLY. REMNANTS SHALL BE IMPACTED IN PLACE.

Benjamin read as rapidly as his vision would allow. Pages of instructions. With each revelation he gave a grunt of amazement. Kingsley said nothing, pacing back and forth before the desk, looking firmly at the carpet. Kingsley's blue shirt and pale brown suit were rumpled and creased, as though he had been sleeping in his clothes.

"It's all there. Very clear, clear indeed," Kingsley said abruptly. "It is coming to 'harvest' us as a species. It demands a hundred thousand people, sacrificed and uploaded into digital form to transmit by microwave."

"Good grief. How?"

"It will translate them into 'magnetic selves' to form a 'company of their selfkind,' it says."

Benjamin asked hollowly, "That's why it came?" why it came?"

"Apparently. It has said before that it suffers from something like outright boredom, though it does not use that term."

"I don't think we can even do this..."

"It says that since we have the 'minimum requirement'-computers, digitization-then it can teach us the rest."

"How convenient for us." Benjamin tried to get his mind around what the Eater might mean. "All to be part of some kind of...'company'?"

"For its library, I suspect. Or museum. Or zoo."

"Someplace it can go and, uh, put up its feet and..."

"Read people like books? As good an a.n.a.logy as any, I suppose."

"It doesn't say?"

There was more from the Eater, sheets of technical description. "It will make of them these 'remnants,' I gather."

"'Remnants'? Meaning the rest of us will be gone? Dead?"

"I believe it sees us all as ephemeral. A 'remnant' would be kept for its own uses for far longer than we would live."

"Or for as long as it found the remnant interesting," Benjamin mused.

Kingsley turned suddenly and faced Benjamin across his messy desk. "I haven't talked to anyone else about this. Arno will get it within minutes and will come running to us in a pure blind panic."

"And he'll want to know what to do," Benjamin said with a sinking resignation. Though the Center now housed whole battalions of specialists and there was surely no shortage of opinions to be had, the pace of events was too rapid to allow much to filter up from below. He and Kingsley would have to have opinions, plans, and options about this.

Kingsley said in a weary gray voice, "And I have not a clue what to say."

"This is for the politicos."

"I do hope so. They are not at their best when required to act quickly."

"We can't comply, of course."

"I wish I understood quite why." Kingsley frowned. "Muslim, Buddhist.... Completely contrary to my instinct, the world's religions appear to agree with you. And I do not know why."

"I believe they're stunned. Aren't we?"

"I am, at least. I would think they'd be more concerned for the ma.s.s, the flock, than the individual."

He chuckled. "I can't explain it. Maybe it's just that being stunned can bring out deep responses. This feels to me to have come from someplace n.o.body knew."

"Because no society has faced anything remotely like this before."

"Maybe in the Old Testament. I never finished reading it. The size of War and Peace. War and Peace.!"

He allowed himself a small grin. "It might fancy a comparison with Jehovah."

"That stilted tone is its way of imitating our ancient voice of authority?"

"I meant more than it merely using a tactic. Perhaps the way to get a grasp of matters is that it may be playing a role, but primarily for itself. It transcends any notion we might have of being self-involved."

"Or it could be adopting a mode that worked before. Maybe it thinks of us as a species it knows about. Or a genera. Order. Kingdom-that's the highest biological cla.s.s, isn't it?"

He was lost in thought. "So it may well have a policy, then-based solely upon its cla.s.sifying of us-regarding what to do if we fail to comply."

"I hope it won't come to that."

Kingsley's face seemed to sharpen harshly, his chin drawing down in derision. "Note the tone of address it uses."

"Yeah, that's an order, all right."